Fusion Grouphttp://fusion.bsc.es
Wed, 20 Mar 2019 22:01:44 +0000 en-US
hourly
1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1http://fusion.bsc.es/wp-content/uploads/logo-150x150.pngFusion Grouphttp://fusion.bsc.es
3232China launches the series production of HTS current leads for ITERhttp://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/03/08/china-launches-the-series-production-of-hts-current-leads-for-iter/
http://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/03/08/china-launches-the-series-production-of-hts-current-leads-for-iter/#respondFri, 08 Mar 2019 09:11:51 +0000http://fusion.bsc.es/?p=3544Read moreChina launches the series production of HTS current leads for ITER]]>Pair of current leads (in/out) at ASIPP (Photo: ITER)

High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) current leads are a key technology of the ITER magnet system, transmitting the huge currents (up to 68 kA) from the power supplies at room temperature to the low temperature superconducting coils installed in the fusion reactor. ITER’s large coils will need 60 current leads located at the end of the magnet feeders, thus operating in a lower magnetic field and reducing the heat load compared to conventional current leads. In fact, the higher cost of HTS current leads is by far compensated by the savings in the operation of the cryoplant.

The HTS current leads for the ITER Tokamak are procured by the Chinese Domestic Agency through the Institute of Plasma Physics (ASIPP) in Hefei, China. After a string of successful tests of current lead prototypes carried out by Chinese contractors during 2015 and 2016, the series manufacturing has been launched with the recent completion of the three current leads types (correction coil, TF coil, PF/CS coils) first series. This constitutes an important milestone in the way to turn nuclear fusion into a reliable source of clean energy.

HTS current lead prototype tested by ASIPP (Photo: ITER)

HTS current leads are essential not only in fusion devices, but to feed the superconducting coils in particle accelerators as well. This is one example in the vast variety of HTS applications, hence the need of developing simulation tools enabling a comprehensive understanding of superconducting devices.

Our Fusion group at BSC is committed to this goal and is currently working in the development of computational tools able to reproduce the multiphysics of large HTS devices by resorting to advanced High-Performance Computing techniques.

WPCD is a group of developers within the EUROfusion consortium with the goal of developing a flexible suit of fusion codes to validate the physics models on current experimental fusion devices and to predict ITER and DEMO scenarios.

The objective of the Annual Planning Meeting was to set a clear roadmap for the different groups forming the community. The main goals of the project for the following years its clear: first to develop code workflows allowing the simulation, analysis and integrating modelling of the different fusion experiments (as JET, ASDEX Upgrade, WEST, etc.) and to produce the first releases to be tested by the users; second, to fully integrate the existing codes to the ITER Integrated modelling and Analysis suite (IMAS) infrastructure.

Our group members, Ignacio and Albert (from left to right), at Marconi supercomputer in CINECA.

The IMAS infrastructure is the new software environment for running the simulation codes and workflows that eases the manipulation of physical data. The IMAS has been developed with the aim of being the main environment to run in the ITER experiment. Hence, a migration from the previous frameworks to the new one is needed.

Indeed, this is one of the task of our group: the integration of the heating code PION into the IMAS and the creation of a workflow, which covers our task in the Heating and Current Drive (HCD) section of the project. Additionally, one of our group members is working in the development of High Performance Computing capability for fusion workflows and its integration into the ITER modelling framework.

The Annual Planning Meeting served to coordinate the work between the different contributors and to establish a clear guideline for 2019 and 2020.

Our PhD student Allah Rakha is back at BSC after successfully completing a six-month research stay at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), Germany. IPP is a leading institute in Europe for both theoretical and experimental studies of fusion plasmas, equipped with two state-of-the-art fusion experimental devices, the ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) tokamak and the world’s largest stellarator Wendelstein 7-X.

Stationed at IPP Garching near Munich, he worked on three-dimensional helical core magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium reconstructions for ASDEX Upgrade and studied the effect of the helical plasma core on shear Alfvén wave continuum spectrum. The research was carried out in close collaboration with Dr. Philipp Lauber (IPP) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jean-Marie Noterdaeme (IPP & UGent). Allah Rakha is grateful for their hospitality during his stay.

ASDEX Upgrade tokamak, Source: IPP

Allah Rakha would also like to acknowledge the funding he received from the Gent University, the Severo Ochoa mobility programme of BSC and the EUROfusion Education and Training Work Package for the stay.

]]>http://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/28/research-stay-at-max-planck-institute-for-plasma-physics-ipp-garching-germany/feed/0Talk on Applied High Temperature Superconductivityhttp://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/15/talk-on-applied-high-temperature-superconductivity/
http://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/15/talk-on-applied-high-temperature-superconductivity/#respondFri, 15 Feb 2019 11:59:49 +0000http://fusion.bsc.es/?p=3461Read moreTalk on Applied High Temperature Superconductivity]]>Professor Edson de Pinho from Universidad Federal Rural de Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ) together with our collaborator Dr. Xavier Granados from Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Barcelona (ICMAB) visited today the MareNostrum Supercomputer and met the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

Professor de Pinho gave a talk entitled “High temperature superconducting devices and risk analysis: usual approach and improvements for design and evaluation” in which he presented some of the activities carried out by the UFRRJ Laboratory of Superconducting Materials and Devices (LMDS).

LMDS Team. (Photo: UFRRJ)

These include the 1st phase of the Brazilian Supercable Project, aimed at the construction of a prototype superconducting cable for power transmission. Special attention was paid to the modelling aspects of HTS conductors on round core, in particular to the assumptions enabling computation cost reduction. Furthermore, he could give an overview of his work in risk assessment for oil and gas industry.

A fruitful discussion about collaboration opportunities in the framework of a new research line on modelling for Applied Superconductivity starting up at BSC followed his talk. Indeed, the need of experimental data in HTS based devices to validate a future HPC code for HTS simulation opens the door to collaborate with other institutions.

]]>http://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/15/talk-on-applied-high-temperature-superconductivity/feed/0Research stay with experiments on AUGhttp://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/08/research-stay-with-experiments-on-aug/
http://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/08/research-stay-with-experiments-on-aug/#respondFri, 08 Feb 2019 07:46:07 +0000http://fusion.bsc.es/?p=3438Read moreResearch stay with experiments on AUG]]>View from the AUG control room during last weeks experiments.

Mervi was the scientific coordinator of the experiments that successfully proved the use of waves tuned to the third harmonic ion cyclotron resonance of deuterium (D) to heat the plasma. Various diagnostics including neutron detectors and neutral particle analysers confirmed the presence of energetic D ions accelerated by resonant wave-particle interaction.

]]>http://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/08/research-stay-with-experiments-on-aug/feed/0Collaborating with CIEMAT and Aalto University on modelling of fast ions in TJ-II stellaratorhttp://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/06/collaborating-with-ciemat-and-aalto-university-on-modelling-of-fast-ions-in-tj-ii-stellarator/
http://fusion.bsc.es/index.php/2019/02/06/collaborating-with-ciemat-and-aalto-university-on-modelling-of-fast-ions-in-tj-ii-stellarator/#respondWed, 06 Feb 2019 10:51:39 +0000http://fusion.bsc.es/?p=3322Read moreCollaborating with CIEMAT and Aalto University on modelling of fast ions in TJ-II stellarator]]>TJ-II stellarator control room (Photo: CIEMAT)

This January Edgar Olivares and Ignacio López de Arbina from the BSC Fusion group spent few intensive weeks at CIEMAT to work on this new project. The project involves two Monte Carlo codes: the ISDEP code, which has been previously used at CIEMAT to simulate energetic ions at TJ-II, and the ASCOT code which stands for “Accelerated Simulation of Charged Particle Orbits in a Tokamak” and not been used for simulations of TJ-II before. Although its name makes explicit reference to tokamaks, ASCOT can be used, with the corresponding modifications, in a stellarator machine, such as TJ-II.

MareNostrum 4.

With ASCOT, the CIEMAT-BSC collaboration has extended to the ASCOT team at Aalto University, Finland. Thanks to their fast technical support, the implementation of the required new features in the code to simulate TJ-II has progressed very smoothly.

The stay at CIEMAT was very useful in order to set up ASCOT code to run for some specific TJ-II plasmas and prepare for the first simulations. We expect to have the first results of the simulations on MareNostrum in the near future to compare the results of the two codes.

On 20 January, Barcelona Supercomputing Center held the 2018 Annual Meeting in the UPC Vèrtex building Auditori (auditorium). In this event, Mateo Valero, BSC director, and Josep Martorell, BSC associate director, reviewed the achievements reached in 2018 and the expected projects in the future.

More than 450 researchers and support staff attended the event. As special guests, the former Secretary of State for Research, Development and Innovation, and former president of the BSC Board of Trustees by the Spanish Government, Carmen Vela, and the former member of BSC Board of Trustees by the Catalan Government and former BSC associate director, Francesc Subirada, attended the meeting.

Carmen Vela and Francesc Subirada.

Our group participated in the BSCTalks. This is a part where researchers can explain to all BSC staff what they are doing through short attractive TED-style presentations. In order to be one of the selected speakers, previously, all candidates have sent a short video where they explained their proposal and these videos were uploaded at a web page. After an internal votation, the eight most voted proposals were selected for giving the talk in the annual meeting.

Xavier Sáez and Dani Gallart gave the talk entitled “Looking at the stars” where they explained the motivation to undertake nuclear fusion research, the fusion group work and the roadmap to get fusion energy.

Xavier Sáez (left) and Dani Gallart (right) during the fusion group talk.

The event finished with an invited lecture by the alpinist Ferran Latorre entitled “The Quest of the 14. The Challenge as a magnet”, where explained his CAT14x8000 project. The aim of this project was to become the first Catalan to climb the 14 highest peaks without oxygen. On 27 May 2017, Ferran achieved this challenge with the climbing of Everest.

Our journal article entitled “Modelling of beam-driven Alfvén modes in TJ-II plasmas” has been accepted for publication in Nuclear Fusion. Nuclear Fusion is one of the renowned journals in our field.

The paper reports on our modelling results aimed at understanding a certain type of energetic-particle-driven instabilities called Alfvén modes in TJ-II stellarator plasmas and their comparisons with experimental results. In particular, we have modelled Alfvén eigenmodes in TJ-II discharges with a dynamically changing magnetic configuration when both steady and chirping modes are observed. The modelled mode frequencies and radial locations are found to be consistent with the experimental findings. We also have drawn important conclusions on the properties of the energetic particles that are resonant with the modes.

Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) is developing a new simulation tool knwon as CHERAB for forward modelling diagnostics based on spectroscopic plasma emission.

CHERAB is being used by fusion scientists to simulate all sorts of visible and infrared plasma measuring tools, known as diagnostics. The diagnostic systems measure the light output of the plasma to study properties such as its temperature and density. Inferring these properties requires an accurate understanding of how the light is produced and bounces around inside the machine. The more accurately we can model these systems the more accurate our measurements of fusion plasmas will be.

A long-standing problem for these fusion diagnostics has been reflections of light from the surfaces inside reactors. If they are not modelled, the reflections can interfere with the ability to make accurate plasma measurements. This is a particular problem for devices with metallic walls such as JET and the future ITER machine. CHERAB solves this through its integration with a ray-tracer.

Ray-tracing is a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through a virtual world and predicting the effects of the light bouncing off objects. The powerful photo-realistic ray-tracer include in CHERAB can handle complex computerised wall models with realistic material properties.

Top view of the simulation of JET with glass walls (Photo: CCFE)

As a proof of the flexibility of this tool, Alex Meakins, one of the CHERAB developers, has run a striking simulation of the JET reactor at Culhman with glass walls that allow to look the hot plasma inside the tokamak during a fusion experiment.

The CHERAB tool is written in Python. It is open-source and is available on github.